Hurray for the modern age! Its affordable cameras has brought us all closer to realising our dreams of creating that personal cinematic masterpiece… much in the same way that being literate has gifted us all the chance to write that timeless novel. In theory, at least. Not many of us bother. Our general lethargy or creative-crestfallenness is clearly not shared with Director, Producer, Co-Screenwriter Jim Groom and his merry bunch of independent filmmakers, who’ve spent 11 long, and frequently painful [...]

It’s that time of year again, folks, where the nights are about 4x as long as the days, you’ve spent all your money on presents and/or scarves and you’ve really got nothing better to do… than to sit and make a audio CD (if you can remember them) that contains all your most wonderlicious musicial moments from the 12 months past. The idea of the compilation CD is thus: with 16000GB capacity MP3 players giving more music at fingertips than [...]

“We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little… we went insane.” – Francis Ford Coppola. Production running waaaay longer than planned? Check. Budgets spiralling out of control? Check. Egos through the roof? Check. Director having his own personal breakdown? Check. Marlon Brando bloated and insufferable? Check. Martin Sheen mid-production heart attack? Check… In the great book of extremely troubled film productions (and there should be one) you’d have to expect a large and significantly [...]

This month I have been spending hours at a time in a dark room scrutinising various cinematical treats. These treats, in order of which I saw them, are as follows: The Hurt Locker In which… Jeremy Renner plays a crazy guy who enjoys putting his life in danger a lot when he diffuses bombs in Iraq. …And that is all I managed to take from this. Other than, bombs go boom! Which I already kind of knew. I’m a fan [...]

So, the teaser trailer for Avatar: the $200m film that will shatter the film world forever with its incredible high-tech 3D amazingness – was released yesterday, in glorious 2D. And it seems the overwhelming response is: ‘meh’. The film, set in the 22nd century, sees the human race invading a distant planet called Pandora to mine for valuable minerals. Or something. The only problem is, human’s can’t breathe or operate very well on the planet without large Transformer (GRR!) type [...]